US: Mage Tower Up - Artifact Challenge Tips
Will you be joining the 0.006% of Blood Death Knights with the appearance? If you were able to complete a challenge, feel free to leave some tips for other users!

The flight path between Algen Point (Broken Shore) and Hafr Fjall (Stormheim) has been adjusted to follow a better route.

Blue Posts

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Priest (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)Discipline in 7.2.5
There are various things still being discussed, so it will be better to talk about it after some changes settle down more, but one good point of feedback was about the targeting on PW: Radiance. We're going to try smart targeting of some sort in the next PTR build. Details TBD, but potentially: "true smart" (lowest-HP) targeting while maintaining the current behavior of favoring targets without Atonement. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Warlock (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)Affliction Warlocks - Malefic Grasp
Hi Affliction Warlocks. Thanks for the posts and feedback so far. I'd like to talk a bit about the change to Malefic Grasp. In general, we agree that communication is warranted since we changed/nerfed a widely taken talent.

Malefic Grasp is very powerful on live. With the current state of Affliction, the talent is taken on virtually every situation in Nighthold, from single-target to sustained multi-target boss fights. There are things about Affliction that we’re not entirely happy with, many of which the community has echoed, and the current feel of Affliction being a single-target spec that focuses its damage into one target rather than spreads its damage out over many targets more evenly, is generally one of them. Malefic Grasp at a high tuning value is a heavy contributor to that. It’s not ideal that even on a sustained multi-target fight right now, Malefic Grasp wins out over Writhe in Agony on the same row, when at first glance Writhe in Agony looks like it should be the go-to talent for sustained multi-target since its benefit scales up uniformly per additional target whereas Malefic Grasp reads as a single-target talent.

Separately, we want to allow Haunt to be a viable Soul Shard spender talent. We’ve heard this from players and also want a Soul Shard spender other than Unstable Affliction in single-target situations. Ways to make Haunt as a Soul Shard spender competitive with a Malefic Grasp at the live value of 70% include dramatically increasing its instant nuke damage, drastically increasing its damage bonus %, or reducing its cooldown further – none of which would feel right on Affliction for a variety of reasons.

Lastly, Affliction’s first talent tier is a really high-power talent tier compared to most talent tiers we have, with Malefic Grasp being over a 20% DPS increase as a single talent. Generally, we aim for talent tiers to be more in the 5-10% range. Very high values can both have distortive effects on the spec and make it hard to balance other talents on the same tier.

That all said, in the next PTR patch, changes you should see are:

All Affliction damage done increased by 15%

Malefic Grasp will go down to a +25% damage increase (down from +70% on live)

Writhe in Agony will be reduced to increase Agony’s max stacks by +5 (down from +10 on live)

Haunt will stay as it currently is on PTR

Based on our numbers, 1) this 15% damage buff negates the 70%->25% reduction to Malefic Grasp, coming out as neutral change DPS-wise for Affliction Warlocks using Malefic Grasp going from 7.2->7.2.5 and 2) brings the relative balance of the Level 15 talent tier much closer to each other. As usual, the numbers may change during PTR according to further playtesting and feedback.

As a footnote, the most recent PTR patch with the current reduction to Malefic Grasp from 70%->40% that came with no other explanation or indication that further changes (compensatory buffs to the baseline spec, further relevant talent adjustments) were coming wasn’t ideal and we’ll try to be more mindful of that in future PTR cycles. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Why would you give affliction a flat 15% damage increase to make up for the talent nerf? They're already dominating dps charts.

Shit like this is the reason I quit this game. Shadow priests are good for one patcth and you nerf them into the ground making them mediocre at best. You turn around and make affliction a BETTER VERSION of shadow priest in every way and then you don't even nerf them as they sit in the top 10 on nearly every fight in nighthold holding all 10 slots on multiple fights.

Last time I did the math after looking at the top 100 affliction and shadow priest logs for every single fight, on average affliction was 160k dps ahead of shadow AT MINIMUM, and on some fights 500k+ ahead of it.

This.

After the recent buffs to other classes shadow priests will be bottom dps. No AoE, bad single target, no moving and casting, crappy new traits.

And what do shadow have to look forward to in the next Tier, shadowfiend set bonusm you couldn't make it up.

0.006% of Blood Death Knights? Is this just a random number thrown out or is there somewhere that shows all the stats for all the different classes and specs? I would love to see the breakdown for the numbers of players and % of players from each spec and class that has completed their challenges

Are there statistics available for other classes/specs? I'd be curious to see which classes had the easiest time with each of their challenges, or specifically if a challenge has far more completions for one spec than it has for another.

I was looking for one at the last mage tower and couldn't find anything, it definitely sounds like the type of easy census MMO-Champ is capable of though. From an analyst perspective, I think you'd just have to cross reference characters that have two achievements:

(my account is not permitted to post automatic links on MMO due to being a low activity account, I apologize)

Shit like this is the reason I quit this game. Shadow priests are good for one patcth and you nerf them into the ground making them mediocre at best. You turn around and make affliction a BETTER VERSION of shadow priest in every way and then you don't even nerf them as they sit in the top 10 on nearly every fight in nighthold holding all 10 slots on multiple fights.

Priests are hybrid classes that can Heal or DPS.
Warlocks are a pure DPS class.

You can't really compare SPriest to Lock. Pure damage classes should always come out above hybrid classes. By how much? Now you can argue that point.

You can't really compare SPriest to Lock. Pure damage classes should always come out above hybrid classes. By how much? Now you can argue that point.

That argument does not fly these days. I'd be all for having specific roles for each class but honestly people would be so angry at a change like that. For example you have a couple superior single targets classes, but they're bad at AE, then you have a couple of really good AE classes. Let's go one step further, then you have a couple of classes that focus on crowd control - yeah this means that only these few classes will even have stuns, roots, silences and things like that. I'd be all for a game like that, ie "old" school rather than "everyone should be on the top".

Yeah so we've had a lot of feedback of this spec, players have told us they want another output for soulshards rather than just unstable affliction. Sooooooo yeah here's a 15% damage increase to every spell. oh yeah turns out you liked the drain soul and agony talents a bit too much so we are nerfing them to force you to pick haunt. Because who wants choices anyway.

That argument does not fly these days. I'd be all for having specific roles for each class but honestly people would be so angry at a change like that. For example you have a couple superior single targets classes, but they're bad at AE, then you have a couple of really good AE classes. Let's go one step further, then you have a couple of classes that focus on crowd control - yeah this means that only these few classes will even have stuns, roots, silences and things like that. I'd be all for a game like that, ie "old" school rather than "everyone should be on the top".

I like how we get waterwalking a few days after most people get flying... Thanks for the useless tower Blizzard lol I want my AP affixes back!

Agree,

Why challenge mode is for classes 910+ ilvl.... The better way would be to scale it to the boss level or to the character level. I tried x times to do my challenge and my dps dont allow me to do that with gear ~900. Every video depicts players with lvl ~915+ and they do it with ease. 10ilvl its abount 150-250k dps (for me) its not small.. ;/